A House committee approved a bill Monday aimed at repealing a six-year-old state law that requires local law enforcement officers to decide if immigrants might be undocumented and report them to federal immigration authorities.

In voting 9-2 to pass SB1258 on to the House, the House State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee cited redundancies, unnecessary costs and erosion of public trust tied to the current immigration reporting law, widely referred to as SB 90.

The committee vote came after county sheriffs, police chiefs, immigrant rights groups and immigrants who had suffered consequences of SB 90 testified in favor of doing away with the law.

The committee approved the measure over the objections of some opponents who fear it could lead to the creation of sanctuary cities where illegal immigrants would be free to congregate in the state.

Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, called that “a red herring.”

“It’s the fictional equivalent of finding the lost city of Cibola or the fountain of youth,” he said.

Some of those who testified about the need to undo the state reporting law were backers of the measure when it was passed in 2006. That was two years before the federal government began the immigration reporting program called Secure Communities that requires local law enforcement to pass on the fingerprints of all arrestees so their status as citizens or legal residents can be determined by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The current state law, which a study showed is costing law enforcement agencies more than $13 million annually, forces officers into making decisions about whether someone they are stopping or arresting is in the country illegally.

The study by the Colorado Fiscal Institute also found that the arresting, reporting and detaining of suspected undocumented immigrants under SB 90 resulted in an average of 22 days longer detention in county jails for the immigrants than for other arrestees.

“SB 90 needs to go away…It is outdated and ineffective,” testified Greenwood Village Police Chief John Jackson, who was representing the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police.

Secure Communities was controversial and unpopular in some quarters when former Gov. Bill Ritter agreed that Colorado would participate in the program. At the time, fears were raised that it would result in the detention and removal of scores of undocumented immigrants with no other criminal record.

In the ensuing years, some of those who originally opposed Secure Communities now view it as more fair than SB 90, especially since the Obama administration has vowed to target the most serious criminal offenders among the undocumented population and to make non-criminals who are in the country illegally a low priority.

Those who testified before the committee Monday said that having law enforcement agencies pass fingerprints of all arrestees to federal immigration officials is more fair than having officers at the street level making decisions about possible illegal status based on skin color or surnames or immigration documents.

“It’s an untenable situation for police officers to make a flash decision right there about a document they’ve probably never seen before,” said Salazar, the House sponsor of the bill.

John “Eddie” Soto with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition testified that Secure Communities still has its problems but that SB90 makes immigrants more fearful of reporting crimes, including domestic violence.

“Because they are brown, they feel like they can’t report crimes,” he told the committee.

Salazar also pointed out that having local officers try to decide who is legal and who is not can lead to increased liability for Colorado law enforcement agencies that should be focused on community policing rather than enforcing federal immigration laws.

Representatives Dan Nordberg, R-Colorado Springs, and Steve Humphrey, R-Severence, voted no on SB 1258. Several other committee members qualified their “yes” votes as being “soft,” and said they were going to do more research on the matter before the bill goes to the House for debate.

Thunderstorms that originated in eastern Utah and along the Western Slope formed a squall line that produced damaging winds and power outages across the state Saturday afternoon, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Greg Hanson.